SCOURGE OF MALARIA

Greymouth Evening Star, 28 September 1929, Page 8

SCOURGE OF MALARIA

SIR RONALD ROSS’ LABOURS.

The prevalence of malaria in many parts of the Empire makes it of importance to British subjects the woild over, and the scientific history of the disease shows that British investigators have played a predominating part in elucidating most of the baffling problems which malaria presents. The name of Sir Ronald Ross is justly honoured in connection with the earliest work on the malarial para site, says the medical corresponded of the Morning Post. Malaria is caused by a parasite which lives in the blood of the infected individual and is conveyed from patient to patient by a species of mosquito. Earlier workers had discovered tiie parasite in the human subject, but it was Ross who, after a long scries of patient observations, found evidence of its existence in the mosquito. This work was reported in 1895, and in 1898 Ross published an account of furl her work by which he h;;d been able to trace a form of malarial infection in birds, which was transmitted by mosquitoes. This work on malaria in birds was carried out in India in most difficult circumstances. Sir Ronald Ross records that the bulk of his investigations, were done with an old microscope with a cracked eyepiece, while tumblers and medicine bottles served for apparatus. Even at the “laboratory” which was provided for him later he had to supply his own microscopes and even pay his own assistants while books of any kind could rarely be obtained. Yet with these poor facilities the whole of the very difficult technique of the experiments on mosquitoes was established.

The methods of keeping the mosquitoes alive, of feeding them, of dissecting them and examining them were worked out so fully that with this information about malaria in birds available it was a comparatively easy step to carry out parallel observations on human malaria. This Sir Ronald Ross would undoubtedly have done had not his duties sent him to investigate another disease elsewhere, and consequently his work was carried out in the first place by Professor Grassi and his colleagues in their well-equip-ped laboratories in Rome. The “Cold storage” of British troops in India —the withdrawal of as many as possible from malarious stations to the hills during the infective season —is the new method employed to lessen malaria attacks in the country. Lieutenant-Colonel J. Mackenzie, who was director of hygiene and pathology at army headquarters in India, and who has written a book on “Army Health in India,” states that throughout the civilisation of the past the “captain of the armies of disease” had taken incalculable toll of human life and treasure, destroyed armies, depopulated cities, arrested the development of vast territories, and brought empires to decay. The number of his victims was beyond computation. In India alone 100,000,000 were attacked every year, and the annual toll of the dead was from one and a-half to (two millions.

A study of the statistics of the last 100 years led irresistibly to the conclusion that, allowing for certain factors, the outline of the medical history of the British Army in India was, in the main, the curve of malaria incidence. Cholera had come and gone, enteric fevers had risen and declined; malaria remained. “Cold storage”—introduced in 1925, and partial mos-quito-proofing, carried out in 1926, had, however, shown that the problem was not insoluble.